Photoshop: Adding Texture to Text

Applying a texture to text is much easier than most tutorials make it seem. Many involve rasterizing the Text layer and creating masks from this to apply to the texture layer. Not only is this a waste of time, but it also prevents you making changes easily.

My method:

Create a text layer with a fairly thick font (so that the texture can be seen)

2. Bring your chosen texture into the file (there are many ways to do this: File>Place, or open the texture image and drag into this file, copy the texture and paste it). If it’s not quite large enough, press Ctrl-T and scale it up to cover all the text.

3. Create a Clipping Mask. Once again there are several ways to do this is Photoshop. The easiest is to hold the Alt key (or Option key on a Mac) and move the cursor to the line between the texture layer and text layer. It will change shape . Then click.

Or you can right-click on the texture layer and choose Create Clipping Mask from the popup menu.

This will only show the texture where the text is.

With this method, you can freely edit the text, or scale or move the texture!